Hi Mike, there really isn't enough information in those numbers to draw any meaningful conclusions, and I would very much doubt they will give out sufficient information for outsiders to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions.
They probably won't even give out how much bandwidth they are allocating to VoD vs. how much bandwidth they have available for digital services (probably around 200MHz for the latter, and this includes downstream data, VoD, and standard digital video).
But just for the sake of argument, say they allocate 72MHz out of that 200MHz for VoD. This would give 12 6-MHz channels, within which they could pack 10-15 VoD (SDTV) subscribers (per 6 MHz channel)simultaneously. Let's call it 12. That would enable 144 simultaneous users.
With a target of 17500 (assuming this means simultaneous) out of 1 million, this is 1.75%. Running with that percentage and assuming it scales across hubs at all levels of hierarchy, that would give about 8300 subs as their cluster size for the target number of VoD users.
But you really can't break it down much more without knowing number of nodes per (secondary)hub, number of subs per node, number of primary hubs (and this is already making assumptions about architecture).
Also, when they say there are 34 "in hub sites," that doesn't necessarily mean there are 34 total hub sites (these servers may have different capabilities and serve different purposes (e.g. some may be redundant backups)), and there may be more than 1 server in some hubs, depending where they are in the network hirearchy.
There are too many permutations to even make a good guess.
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When you say there are 35k digital subs today and the target for VOD is 17500, does this mean you have to "subscribe" to VoD and pay a startup/install fee, and/or get a truck roll (and possibly a new STB) when you activated it? Or do they "push" a software download to your STB to enable it? (Just curious, this isn't really related to the above arguments)
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PS, so here you are, enjoying new digital services, and all I want for Christmas is for @HOME to get their email running reliably for more that 24 hours straight! The really annoying thing is--as usual--that they waste my time trying to prove the problem is on my end (even though they know they have had nationwide email problems over the past several weeks). |
